Transcripts
1. Introduction: I love to create portraits and I enjoy illustrating empowered women that could represent any and all of us. I am Agatha Viera and I'm a Brazilian graphic designer and illustrator based in the UK. I have worked as an in-house graphic designer for different brands in Brazil and England for more than eight years now. In the past year, I saw my work evolving into units of graphic design and digital illustration. Drawing portraits help me to find my style and play with colors and I want to share what I have learned and still learn with you. Discover my way to search for inspiration, select a color palette, and compose beautiful images. You don't need advanced drawing skills to create a great digital portrait. In this course, I will share what I know about limited color palettes and composition and we will create a digital portrait together based on reference photos and a touch of creativity. To create a digital portrait, I'll be using an iPad with Procreate, but feel free to use any other drawing software of your choice. You can also apply the same principles to draw analogically with traditional pen and paper if you prefer. This class is designed for beginners who are interested in illustration, but students of any level are welcome to participate and enjoy. In the end of this class, you will have additional portraits, that's ready to share on social media, and intent your followers. By completing this task, you'll be able to create not only one, but many impactful and colorful illustrations by applying the same principles that you'll learn in the following lessons. This is my 2nd class here on Skillshare, so I am super excited to get to know you and see your beautiful creations. Thank you so much for watching this video, and I see you in the 1st lesson.
2. Your Class Project: Your project in this class is to create a digital illustrated portrait on Procreate using reference for this, a limited color palette and of course, your creativity. We will have lessons about the basics of color, composition, portrait drawing, and Procreate to get you comfortable with the basic knowledge and get you inspired to create your portrait. In the end of this class, you will have a digital portrait that is ready to share on social media. To complete this task, you will need an iPad with Procreate, but feel free to use any other software of your choice or you can also draw with traditional pen and paper if you prefer. I can't wait to start. I'll see you in the next lesson.
3. Reference Library: When I'm creating a portrait, I always start by gathering inspiration and reference photos. I know it sounds a bit crazy, but I also like to think about my subject as if it was a real person. I think about my subject's country of origin, and what he or she is feeling, and that helps me to create the look and feel of the portrait. Once I know what I want to do, I gather all my references together, and sometimes I create a mood board. When I'm looking for inspiration, I enjoy selecting portraits and clothes references from fashion photography. I have this habit of collecting for this from fashion brands in my own marketings and saving it in my personal library. The reason for that is because I worked for a few years for a fashion brand here in London, and I used to design their email marketing communications. To be aware of what the competition was doing at that time, I ended up signing for many British and American fashion brands to receive their emails, and get inspiration for my work. I also enjoy fashion photography because you can get amazing references for poses and, of course, references for trendy clothes. I use Savee platform to keep my photos organized, and you can access this public folder on the link below so you can be inspired by those folders too. Maybe you some of the photographs in here as reference pictures for your class portraits. Another way that I enjoy gathering reference images is going through magazines. You can see how destroyed my magazines are, because I cut the images that I want to make mood boards, scan, or make a collage. For this class portrait, I chose to illustrate a Brazilian woman that is originally from Bahia, a place located on the north eastern coast of Brazil. Women from Bahia are called Baianas, and many of them proudly wear traditional costume that is colorful and it's part of Brazilian's cultural heritage. Now that I have my idea in place, I create a rough mood board with my references. This helps me to visualize the final portrait, define my ideas, and will serve as a guide for when I start drawing. An important thing to have in mind when you're creating your illustration is to use your references respectfully. What I mean with that is that your final portrait should be a mix and the sum of all your inspirations and not a copy of your references. In the book, Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon wrote, "If you have one person you are influenced by, everyone will say that you are the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, then everyone will say you're original." I really like this quote and I think there is a lot to learn from it. When you are creating a portrait, for example, you can copy the pose from one reference, gather the colors from another reference, the clothes inspiration maybe from your friends' outfits, and the accessories from a magazine. Who knows? This way, you have a result that is unique and yours only. Now, it's your turn. Take some time, think about your subject, gather your references, your inspiration, put everything together, and create your mood boards. Remember to have fun in the process.
4. Limited Palette Inspiration: I love using limited color palettes for my work. I love the simplicity of it. As a graphic designer learning to illustrate, it just came naturally to me as a result of my work with branding and corporate identities. Another reason why I love using limited color palette, it's because I love bold, contrast, and vibrant color combinations. That's why I'm so excited to share my passion with you. Coloring a network is so as challenging and choosing the right color palette can be overwhelming. Artists and illustrators around the world spend sometimes hours deciding and changing colors on their work. For that reason, I would like to encourage you to choose a maximum of six colors to work on your class project. Working with a more restricted color palette will help you save time and effort. Here Here three good reasons why I like working with limited palettes. When you are a beginner, working with 3-6 colors is recommended because it will help you to see the relationships between colors more easily. With a limited color palette, you can quickly tell whether the colors work well together or if they clash. It can help you define your style. It's much easier to create a harmonic look. When working with a few colors, you also need to be aware of the limitations that your choices bring. Here is my advice, contrast is king. A good contrast between the colors and how they relate to each other is essential to get a nice final result. A limited color palette does not work well for all subjects or styles. If your illustration style is a bit more realistic, for example, then a limited color palette might not work well for you. Color and composition, come hand-in-hand. You can use brilliant color combinations, but if your composition is not well planned, then the results can be disappointing. Composition is crucial to lead the eye and keep the viewer engaged. We will talk more about that in the following lessons. To finalize, I want to share the work of artists that inspire me when thinking about color and composition. Lisa Congdon masters contrast and her color choices are playful and bold, matching perfectly with her illustration style and subjects. Malika Favre uses bold and vibrant colors with clean lines and vector illustration, it is super classy. I am a big fan of Olimpia Zagnoli's work and I really enjoyed her class here in Skillshare. You can check it out if you haven't yet. She works with saturated colorful combinations and her vector illustrations are minimalistic and clean. Last but not least, Orla Kiely's style is vintage, so her colors are tone down a lot, but she works with very limited colors many times using complementary colors. I hope you got inspired by this lesson and are ready to learn more.
5. The Basics of Colour: Let's talk about color. Learning how colors interact with each other will definitely help you to feel more confident when choosing your own color palettes and making beautiful color combinations. Colors play a big part in my work as a designer and illustrator, and I like to create bolds and contrast color combinations. In this lesson, let's dive into the basics of color and l will take you through color combinations and color terminologies, they are very good to know. Let's starts with the color wheel. You're probably familiar with the color wheel, whether it's from school or from studying design. The color wheel is divided into 12 different color heaps. It includes primary colors like blue, red, and yellow. Secondary colors, which are made up of a mixture of primary colors like green, orange, and purple, and also tertiary colors like violet, amber, and magenta. Color terminology. Here are the words that you need to know. Hue is a true color without tint or shade, like red or orange, for example. This is generally what we mean when we say color. Saturation. Saturation is the intensity of a color. A color with high saturation is far from gray and a color low in saturation is closer to gray. A shade is made by adding varying amounts of black to appear hue. Maroon, for example, is a shade of red. On the other hand, a tint is made by adding varying amounts of white, and as you might guess then, pink is a tint of red. Here are five different basic categories of color combinations. A monochromatic color combination is made up of only one color or heap. They will include different variations of this color, like a red, a slightly darker red, and then an even darker red. It is a color combo that is easy to create and it's a good place for you to start when you're a beginner. Complementary. A complementary color combo is made up of colors that sits directly across from each other on the color wheel, like red or green or blue with orange, for example. They work really well when you're looking for a bold, high-contrast look that stands out. Analogous. Analogous color combinations a bit from hues that sit side-by-side on the color wheel, like orange and red. You can start with one primary analogous color as a base, and then you choose your palette from that. Just remember to have enough contrast to avoid everything looking the same. A split complementary color combination involves a base color and its two neighbors on the color wheel. It works well, and because the colors aren't too far away from each other, it looks less bold. Triadic. A triadic color combination uses colors that are equidistant around the color wheel. They can be both in vibrant or cool and calm depending on the combinations that you pick. Now it's time for you to have a goal. As a quick exercise, I'd like you to practice a little bit of what we just learned with the help of Adobe Color. Adobe Color is a known line color palette generated by Adobe and it's perfect for you to practice creating your own color palettes. Here is how Adobe Color looks like. Basically, you can play with the color wheel and it will generate color palettes for you. It is fully customizable and you can also change the color scheme to make different combinations. You can also adjust and change the values over here, or adding a color codes. It is also possible to change the color mode to suit your project needs. In the Export tab here in the top, you can find inspirations and trends. If you want to save the color palettes that you created, you can take a print screen or if you have an Adobe account, you can save it directly in your library. Have fun. We covered a lot about color in this lesson, so I prepare the cheat sheet for you. You can download it in the Projects and Resources area. Now, it's time to experiment. Now that you learned the theory, I want you to go there and experiment as much as you can. It is very important to learn the rules and the theory, but I believe that you learn much more by trying and experimenting. Also, remember that there is no right or wrong when it comes to color and art. I hope that this class gave you a good overview about color and that you're ready to learn more. See you.
6. The Basics of Composition: Composition is the key to create a great illustration. I use composition rules to plan out my sketches. Nowadays because of years of practice as a graphic designer, I think about composition in a more intuitive way, and I want you to do the same. In this lesson, we will understand what composition is and how planning your sketches with composition in mind can help you to level up your illustrations. What is composition? Composition is the arrangement of elements within a work of art, meaning every few days inside the Canvas, in your drawing, illustration, or even photograph should be placed in a way that's balanced and pleased to the eye. Why is composition so important? Composition is important to create a balanced and interesting image. Depending on your style, you can work with different composition rules, like the rules of thirds or the golden ratio. In our case, as we're focusing on simple portrait illustrations, I'd like you to have only three things in mind. Number 1, think about balance, weight distribution, and focal points. Pay attention to the balance between the elements, how the proportions work, and highlight elements that you want to be the fewest focal points. Number 2, mind the negative space. The space between the illustration and the canvas is called the negative space. Negative space is super important to balance your composition. Number 3, add extra elements. Add interesting elements to compose your portrait. It could be an accessory, the background, or an interesting piece of clothing, for example. To give you a more practical example, I took some features of three objects from my room, and you can see how the different arrangements of each object, the different angles I took the pictures, and the way that the elements were framed can drastically change the way that we perceive the scene. You can create a harmonic composition by paying attention in the position and hierarchy of the elements in your drawing or photograph. Understanding those tips can help you in the creation process. But don't worry too much and follow your instincts when creating your own portraits in the way that feels right and best for you. Practice is the way to go. See you in the next lesson.
7. The Basics of Portrait Drawing: Drawing portraits can be very intimidating. When I started drawing portraits, drawing a human face was always a struggle and I am still learning. But unlike traditional drawing, illustration offers us the possibility to be playful, so you can create your own style and define your own proportions. So this makes you free to create the way that feels best for you. In this lesson, I'll show you my way to draw a human face from the front view with a simple step-by-step. I also put together two quick exercises that you can do to practice and also find your own style. Here is a time-lapse of my way to draw a face from imagination. I start drawing a central line and then a circle, and I add a knot in the bottom of the circle to make it look like an upside down egg. This is the base for the face. Then I divide both sides of the face to have the eye line. I like to draw a line a bit above the middle of the egg to mark the middle of the eyes. From there, I feel more confident to create eyes and eyebrows, nose and mouth. Now I draw the ears aligned to the top of the eyebrows. As you can see, I don't follow traditional drawing rules, but I draw the way that works well for me and for my portrait style. This proves that you don't need any advanced drawing skills to create your portrait. You just need to sketch it and then you need to refine the sketch as much as possible. I hope that you learned a little bit by watching this time-lapse, but of course, I believe practice is always the best way to learn. I created two exercises to help you get familiar with the human face and also recognize your drawing style to apply into your final portrait. You can find both exercises for download in the projects and resources area. Exercise 1, drawing from observation. I put together some reference photos, and I would like you to draw the images that you see in the squares next to it. This is a good exercise and you can do it as many times as you want to get used to proportions and also try different styles if you fancy a challenge. I encourage you to use a pen or a color pencil and avoid using an erase at all. There is no need to be pressured or worry too much as this is only an exercise. You can draw guidelines from the photo into your blank square if that helps you. You can follow your own style and draw in a realistic or more playful way. Exercise 2, mirroring a photo. In this sheet, I'd like you to mirror the image that you see and complete the other half of the portrait. Remember that this does not need to be perfect or realistic, and depending on your style, the proportions can be modified. I also encourage you to find some extra images online or in magazines, cut them in half, and then do more of this exercise. It helps your brain to learn faster and this is a super nice exercise. Now it's your time to practice. I hope that you enjoyed the exercises.
8. The Basics of Procreate: Procreate is a fantastic tool for illustration. It is one of the most advanced painting and drawing apps ever designed for a mobile device. To give you a bit of background here, I personally started using Procreate over a year ago, and I thought it was very intuitive and easy to learn, and, of course, I hope that you feel the same. Something that I found really difficult in the beginning was actually getting used to drawing on glass instead of paper, the way that we're used to. Guess what? I'm still adapting. So please be patient with yourself and take your time to learn this new tool. It will pay off in the end. So let's get ready to learn the basics of Procreate. Once you have the Procreate app installed on your iPad, the first thing that you will see when you open Procreate is the Gallery. Everything you create will be saved here in the Gallery. It is like having a digital sketchbook. In the Gallery, you have the option to select an artwork to Preview, Share as a JPEG, PSD, which is a Photoshop file, PDF, and more. You can also Duplicate or Delete an artwork. When you select multiple artworks, you can also stack them. This means that they will be together in your Gallery similar to when you create a folder in your computer. You can also Import a file or Import a photo from your iPad's gallery. Now, we're still here in the Gallery, and this plus sign is where we will create a new canvas. A Canvas is nothing more than a blank or new page, and as you can see, Procreate already has a few canvas sizes in the default setup, and you can always customize it. Now, for this practice, I will select the "Screen Size" option, and now we are inside Procreate Canvas, and here is where the magic happens. Let's divide the screen into right and left. The top right tools are the most essential ones, and the top left tools are a bit more advanced, and I could call them secondary for when you're a beginner. So let's dive into the most important tools for when you're starting. Brushes Library. In this paint icon is where all your brushes are. It is your digital pencil case where most of your art tools are. Procreate comes with many fantastic brushes, and you can also buy new brushes, create your own brushes, or customize and modify the default brushes. I won't be covering that today as we are only talking about the basics, but I encourage you to explore every single brush that you have, trying them out, and learning how they behave according to the pressure, size, angle, texture, and so on. Now, below here, you can change the brush size, dragging up or down, and the brush opacity, also, by dragging up or down. Smudge Tool. Near the brush icon is the Smudge Tool. This is very straightforward. With it, you can mix colors and blend your artwork. Eraser. One advantage of drawing digitally is definitely being able to make as many mistakes as you need. You can erase and make fine adjustments with the Eraser Tool. It works just as the Brush and the Smudge Tool, as you can adjust the size and the opacity in here. Also, all the brushes that are present in your Brushes Library are also available as erasers. Layers. If you're familiar with Adobe programs like Photoshop, for example, you are probably familiar with using layers with your art. I think one of the best things about working digitally is that you can work with layers in a non-destructive way. Layers let you move, edit, recolor, and delete individual elements without messing up with your entire work. So here is one example of how I work with Layers. You can see that each element is in a different layer. For example, I can easily change the color of the base layer of the heart without changing all the elements. You can also change the way that layers interact with each other by using Blending Modes. If you tap this N button, you can find these different Blending Modes that can be super-helpful to achieve a certain look. The N stands for Normal. So if you want to go back to how it was before, you can always select Normal. I suggest that you play around with the Blending Modes for a few minutes. Clipping Mask. You can see here on Layer 3, that I added a texture inside the heart. This is a mask, and it means that anything that I do in this layer will be restricted to the area that I selected. In this case, the area that I selected was Layer 2, the heart. When you tap on the layer you want to mask, in our case, Layer 3, for example, you can have options like Copy, Rename, and Select Layer, and one of my favorites and most important ones to highlight in this lesson is the Clipping Mask. As you can see, what is masked is always the layer above the object that serves as it's base, and the mask is indicated by this little arrow on the side. Color and color palettes. To select a color, you can use the Eyedropper tool by just pressing and holding on top of the color that you want. To choose a new color, you can tap the color preview circle and you'll find many options of color visualization. The first option is the Disc. The second one is Classic, and it is similar to the Photoshop structure if you are familiar with Photoshop. The third one is Harmony, where you can find a triadic combination of colors. The fourth one is Value. So if you have a specific color code or hexadecimal number, you can add it here. The last one is color Palletes. You can create a color palette or import a new one. To create a color palette, you need to tap this plus sign here on the top, and then select the color that you wish to add and tap again to edit inside the pallet box. It's that simple? Press and hold the color to delete it from your color palette and press and hold the color to move it around. You can also create a new palette from a file, a photo, or by taking a picture like this. Now I want to show you a little bit about gestures. Procreate has many hidden tricks and those tricks are done with gestures. Gestures will help you work with the canvas, brushes, layers, colors, and more. There are around 50-60 possible gestures, and here are five gestures that I find absolutely essential. Pinch to zoom. Use a pinch to zoom in and out of your artwork to move from fine details to the big picture. Pinch twist to rotate. Rotate your canvas to an angle that works best for you. Quick undo. Two-finger tap to undo. Quick redo. Three-finger tap to redo. Three fingers swipe to cut, copy, or paste. You can invoke a floating menu with all the cut, copy, and paste options that you need. Now that we've gone through the basics, take your time to experiment as much as you can. I know that we covered quite a lot in this lesson. So it takes a lot of time to get used to a new tool, and thinking about that, I prepared a cheat sheet for you to use as much as you'll like until you feel like a Procreate expert. Now, let's set up our document together. [MUSIC]
9. Setting Up Procreate: Before you start creating your portrait, let's set up your Procreate's documents together. Instagram portrait size is a three by four ratio, and it is also a great size to post on Facebook and other social channels. Let's open Procreate. Can you see this plus icon in your Procreate gallery? Let's click on that and click again in this smaller plus underneath, to create a keystone preset. On dimensions, we will set the canvas size to 768 pixels by 1,024 pixels. I like to set the resolution to 300 DPI. This means that if you want to print your illustration in the future, you have already the perfect resolution. In the color profile, we will choose sRGB, the 2nd option. Here on the top, you can rename your document. I will call mine My Class Project. We will leave all other settings as default for this project. That's all. We're ready to start sketching.
10. Sketching Your Portrait: The sketching process is for me the most important phase of creating an illustration. The sketch is the base to everything, and having a clean sketch will help you to add color and details to your final piece. My way to sketch is very simple and it proves that you don't need any advanced drawing skills to create a great digital portrait. To sketch I recommend using a brush that's similar to your pen or pencil texture. I like to use a free brush called Procreate pencil. It comes with Procreate and you can find it in the default brushes under the sketching section. It is really similar to the texture of a real pencil and I'm a big fan of this brush. If you'd like to have your mood board visible on top of your canvas when you're sketching, you can add it as a reference. In the action panel, you can select the option "Canvas". Then in the drop-down menu, there is an option called Reference. Turn that on, and select the image that you want from your iPad's gallery. This is a very good way to have the reference image always there without interfering in your drawing area. You can also move it around and modify the size as you like. Depending on what I'm sketching, I prefer not to have the mood board visible because I don't like to be too hard on myself trying to copy a pose or have a perfect drawing in a minute. I find that this can cause a lot of frustration. So with time, you can see what things works best for you. Now, I start by sketching a really rough base. I find it helpful to draw easy geometric shapes in the beginning when I am mostly trying to get the proportions right the composition in place, and also literally visualizing the idea from my head down into my Canvas. Now I can start adding more organic shapes to define the head, the neck, and the body. As you might remember from our lesson, the basics of portrait drawing. I drew a few guidelines in the face to help me to place the eyes, eyebrows, nose, and mouth accordingly. Nothing needs to be perfect and don't put too much pressure on yourself because you can refine the sketch over and over. I find it very helpful to create new layers to help me draw on top of the previous sketch versions. I also like to change the color of the pencil brush when I create a new layer, to refine the sketch and see the lines more easily. To create a new layer, you just need to press the "Plus" button at the top right of the Layers panel, and this will add a new layer above your active layer. To delete, duplicate or lock a layer. You can select a layer, then swipe right to left on top of it, to review those options. I usually take a long time sketching. On a more complex illustration, I spend up to two hours only on the sketching process. The coloring usually goes a bit quicker. So I keep refining and refining and refining and once I feel pretty happy about my sketch I then clean any overlapping lines and add my final details to help me to see the contrast of the final piece. Now that I'm happy with the sketch, let's add some color.
11. Applying Colour: Adding color is definitely my favorite part in the process of creating an illustration. I remember when I was younger, I used to draw only with black marking on white paper, and nowadays my work is super colorful, and colors play a huge part in everything I do. The way that I work with color, and I have already a color palette with most of the colors that I used for my portraits. But of course, when you starting, you don't have a predefined color palette yet. You need to understand how you're going to choose the colors, and I'll show you the way that I work, and then you can try the same way or you can discover the way that works best for you. I always start by choosing the background color, because the background color, we'll define all the other colors that will come afterwards. Because I need the other colors to contrast well with the background color. This makes sense. Here the first layer is my sketch. I will rename this as a sketch and below it as my background color. To change the background color you just need to tap on top of it, and choose the way that you want to pick the color. In my case, I will choose this yellow from my color palette. Now everything that comes on top of the background layer needs to contrast well with this yellow that I choose. I will create a new layer and I will put my sketch above this layer. The sketch is always visible and I can start adding blocks of color in this new layer. I will start the color of the skin, as this is one of the biggest blocks of color in my composition. You can see this key tone didn't have enough contrast with the yellow from the background so tried a darker tone, and now I'll keep adding layers between the background and the sketch layers, and we'll fill all the elements with blocks of colors. Adding layers will help you understand each separate element, and of course, if you need to change one specific thing, you don't need to worry about changing your entire work. You just need to select the specific layer that you wish to change or delete, and so on. Remember that we spoke about clipping masks in the basics of Procreate lesson, here Here a practical example of how I use the clipping mask function to add the elements inside the hair accessory. All the details placed within the blue block of color. Finally, now that I have filled out all the blocks of colors, and I'm happy with the color choices and the overall contrasting of the piece. The last thing I do is adding the line work. I like to create black lines to add detail and increase contrast in my illustration. To do that, I change the opacity of the sketch layer to fade it a bit, and it's easy for me to see, and then I create a new layer on top of the sketch layer, and all I need to do now is start tracing the sketch layer, and it's ready. I hope you liked watching the process and you are now more inspired and confident to create your own portraits.
12. Exporting: Once you have finalized your beautiful portrait, you're ready to export it and share it on your social channels. Exporting your illustration is super easy and quick. There are many ways to do it. I will show you how to save a JPEG version of your illustration so it's ready for you to post on your social media page. Is still inside you art work, you have here the Actions window and the third option on the top menu is Share. Let's tap "Share" and choose the option "JPEG". Most of the time when I am exporting, I use the option to AirDrop. This way I can send the image from Procreate directly into my phone via Bluetooth, so it's super quick for me to share my illustration on Instagram. If AirDrop is not available to you, you can save the image to your iPad's gallery or you can email it to yourself. The sharing options will, of course, depend on what apps you have installed into your iPad. It may be different from mine. One thing I think is very important is to keep all your final work safe and available online. Once I sent my tape back to my phone, I also like to save my work into a cloud system like Google Drive or Dropbox, for example. But it is totally up to you. Explore the options that you have and see what's more convenient to you. You can also share your work from the gallery. You just need to click "Select", tap on the artwork, and tap "Share", so you have again the same options. Now that you know how to export, you can show your illustration to everyone.
13. Conclusion: Wow, you made it. Congratulations, and thank you so much for taking my class. I really hope that this class was helpful to you and that you feel now confident to start creating your own portraits. We covered quite a lot in this class from portrait creation, composition, color combinations, and how to get started with Procreate. I hope that you feel like you have a solid and good foundation now to start creating your own impactful portraits. I cannot wait to see your creations in the project gallery. I am also available for feedback, questions, discussions. So feel free to message me here or you can also message me on my Instagram page. Just before you go, this is my second class here on Skillshare. If you are interested in stationery design, you can check my class that is called Design a Beautiful stationary Set on Procreate and Adobe Photoshop, and also, you can follow me here on Skillshare so you can get a notification anytime that I share a free download or announce a new class. Thank you so much again for taking this class, and I hope that you have fun creating your own portraits.
Agatha Vieira, Graphic Designer, Illustrator & Mentor
